Still life

Vercruysse took the message to the next regular meeting of the artists co-op at DECA, coincidentally the next night. "We went down to Sushi Nights and had a beer and agreed to do whatever we could to keep the doors open," she recalls. "We'll volunteer if we have to, everyone said." The group of three artists (Campagna, Booth, Dickinson) and two Deep Ellum business leaders (Stephen Elsaesser, owner of Home Concepts, and Vercruysse) agreed to run the center without pay for what they hoped would be a temporary rescue. Blanton accepted their offer, and as a token of good faith, put them all on the DECA board. He also waived the rent to lower overhead.

In less than a week, the inmates had taken over the asylum. "There was a sense of urgency," says Vercruysse, who also became board president. "Frank [Campagna] was so passionate about it, and it was a situation that was tailor-made for him."

"When this place opened, I had said, 'It's here. It's a gift,'" Campagna says. "You don't give gifts back. You take it and work with it until it becomes what it's supposed to be."

"I remember thinking, if this place closes, it will be the death knell," says Booth. "People would say there is no art in Deep Ellum, because we can't even keep this nonprofit organization going."

Campagna, Booth, and Dickinson became curators for visual-art shows in a space that had to be coerced to show their work before. They focused on group shows, featuring themselves and other Deep Ellum artists -- muralists, spray-can artists, scenic artists, and painters in oils. Clay Austin, Greg "Ozone" AKA "Toy" Contestabile, David "Mosquito" Hawley, Jim Sasso, and Eddie Winterhawk were among those who created new works that Campagna says showed the "fine art" side of their abilities.

The trouble with this strategy, though, was that DECA's art openings took on a sense of déjà vu. Every new show looked like the one before it. It was the kind of art that was already on the walls, in the bars, and on the tunnels of Deep Ellum. The same kind of work, by the same handful of artists, was showing month after month.

It also seemed as though Campagna was trying to recapture his past: He and Deep Ellum go back to 1982, when he lived and painted in a 4,500-square-foot warehouse studio and showered illegally in the alley with a garden hose. "I was one of the first artists down here," he says. His art is all over Deep Ellum, his muralist tendencies showing up outside establishments like Home Concepts and Fat Ted's, and in the Good-Latimer tunnels. He booked bands back then as well, to pay the $450-a-month rent for the warehouse, bringing the Meat Puppets to Theatre Gallery one night, hosting the Dead Kennedys at his place the next.

Cast out of Deep Ellum by higher rents, Campagna got married, had children, and moved to White Rock Lake to raise his family. Yet at DECA, he clung to an idea that Deep Ellum art deserved a designation. Not even Campagna will go so far as to say there's a "Deep Ellum School" of art, but there's a look to the work he, Booth, and Dickinson brought to the arts center during the spring and summer after they took over DECA.

Group shows featured friends of the three new board members, as well as the artists themselves. They favored fantastical paintings, flashy abstracts, representations of pop-culture icons like Elvis and stylized pinup girls. The look of the work is illustrative overall, often air-brushed, and some of the technique goes the way of the beginner -- tentative brush strokes, too little paint on the canvas -- and the pieces are easily dismissed in a category known as "student work."

Campagna believed DECA could bring respect to "Deep Ellum artists." After all, back in the 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat painted images and graffiti all over New York City's East Village, and he got famous. Campagna painted murals and text all over Deep Ellum, and he got pigeonholed. If Deep Ellum mirrored the East Village's edgy bar and music scene in the early 1980s, it hasn't come into its own with SoHo's kind of art scene, or Chelsea's, or Brooklyn's, in the 1990s. SoHo's legendary NYC neighborhood has close to 300 art galleries, while Deep Ellum has fewer than 10, and that's counting Exposition Park.

Nancy Whitenack's Conduit Gallery is one of the best. Over the last 15 years, she's made it a destination in Deep Ellum by filling it consistently with the edgy work of established contemporary artists and even dedicating a small annex gallery to emerging newcomers. She doesn't show "Deep Ellum artists," she says, because she's not sure what that means, and it doesn't seem particularly relevant. She chooses to be in Deep Ellum because she loves the "grittiness" and "diversity" of the neighborhood.

Whitenack says that while she longs for what was going on in Deep Ellum in the 1980s, when artists could afford to keep studios there, her business benefits more from the mainstream crowds that now flock to her gallery. The "upscaling of everything," she says, forced artists out, the same artists who first got everything moving in Deep Ellum. She's nostalgic for galleries like Laura Carpenter, DWGallery, Ruth Wiseman, and Herling Gallery that have closed or moved out, but she doesn't believe that anyone can restore Deep Ellum's past or even needs to. Instead, she sees the need for DECA as another credible arts venue, but says it can survive only if its vision is clear.